My understanding is that rent control backfired pretty spectacularly in the long term.

The better plan here would be to stop companies from buying residential properties, to incentivized the conversation of commercial properties into apartments, to penalize banks and individuals who are sitting on unused residential properties.

Oh, and wipe out all student loan debt so that younger generations have a prayer of buying a house someday.

My understanding is that rent control backfired pretty spectacularly in the long term.

Yeah, the basic problem with rent control is that it creates the opposite long-term incentive from what you want.

Rentable housing is like any other good -- it costs more when the supply is constrained relative to demand, costs less when supply is abundant relative to demand.

If rent is high, what you want is to see more housing built.

What rent control does is to cut the return on rents, which makes it less desirable to buy property to rent, which makes it less desirable to build property, which constrains the supply of housing, which exacerbates the original problem of not having as much housing as one would want in the market.

I would not advocate for it myself, but if someone is a big fan of subsidizing housing the poor, what they realistically want is to subsidize housing for the poor out of taxes or something. They don't want to disincentivize purchase of housing for rent.

Where’s all this housing being built as a result of sky-high rents? If they are being built, they’re being snatched up immediately by “investor” parasites.